Book Review: The Witches by Roland Dahl

October 23, 2020

Not going to lie, if I was a child I would be severely freaked out by this book. We follow a little boy that looses his parents pretty early on, so he goes to live with his lovely grandmother. She is a lovely woman of eighty-six with a lot of vigor and excitement still in her. She tells the boy stories of witches that haunt small children and ways to spot them. They, for one, are always women. They wear gloves constantly and pointy toed shoes and cannot grow a single hair on their head so they must wear fancy wigs to cover up their naked heads. And because they have no hair their heads itch terribly with the wigs laying directly on them. The little boy thinks these stories his grandmother is telling him are rather fantastic, but doesn’t quire believe her until he meets one himself.

Meeting one Witch, he was able to escape and feel no repercussions of having met her, but he goes on a summer holiday with his grandmother and happens upon the whole population of English Witches. He is able to sit through a meeting without getting detected, but their noses are better than he had hoped and he is found out. We follow this smart little boy in his adventure of a lifetime trying to escape the Witches and get back to his grandmother to tell her that all of this is true.

Spoiler: he makes it back to his grandma, but with a little bit of a new look. While the boy and his grandmother win in the end, I would still have had a very hard time not thinking about this often if I was a small child. Roland Dahl makes, yet another, book of horror for children. He is a fantastic writer and his illustrator, Quinten Blake, so accurately portrays the fear, but also the excitement of all Dahl writes. Yet another Dahl book I would highly recommend to anyone of any age, but this one I would take extra caution with little ones. I can tell you I would have been very haunted by it.